Tomato Blight Spreading

  • The blight hitting tomatoes is actually the same blight responsible for the Irish potato famine in the mid-19 century. (Photo by T. A. Zitter, courtesy of Cornell University)

If you’ve been waiting all season
for that quintessential taste of
summer – a juicy, ripe tomato from
the garden – you might be disappointed.
This year a tomato blight has swept
across the Northeast and is moving
into Midwestern gardens and farms.
Julie Grant reports:

Transcript

If you’ve been waiting all season
for that quintessential taste of
summer – a juicy, ripe tomato from
the garden – you might be disappointed.
This year a tomato blight has swept
across the Northeast and is moving
into Midwestern gardens and farms.
Julie Grant reports:

Walk around this outdoor farm market in Cleveland and just say the words ‘tomato blight’ – nearly anyone in earshot has a story to tell.

Susan Myers says her home garden has given over to what she thinks is late blight.

“But it’s pretty serious. I mean, it’s like wiping out everything. I have lots of tomatoes and all the leaves are dropping. I’ve never, ever had that before.”

It doesn’t look like the farmers here are having trouble with tomato blight. Most tables are piled high with bright reds and yellows.

Skip Conant has a beautiful display of heirloom tomatoes – but he’s not sure how many more weeks he’ll have fruit to offer.

Conant: “We definitely have tomato blight. It’s been a cool, wet spring, so, yeah. There’s a fair amount tomato blight.”

Grant: “What does it look like?”

Conant: “You’ll see a yellowing and curling on the leaves and then the stem will turn brown. The plant will become a very brown. Die from basically the inside out or the bottom up.”

It’s hard to tell yet if these Midwestern growers are starting to see the same blight that decimated the northeast tomatoes.

Bill Fry is a plant pathologist at Cornell University. He’s studied late blight for 35 years. Fry says it looks like irregular shaped black spots, and can appear on the leaves or the fruit. It can destroy an entire crop in just a few days.

This is the same blight responsible for the Irish potato famine in the mid-19 century. Growers have seen late blight since then. But Fry says, not at these epidemic proportions.

“The fact that it’s just everywhere is, I think, is the major difference from previous years.”

This wasn’t the first cool, wet spring on record. So, why has the blight so bad this year?

It’s kind of ironic. Fry and his colleagues have been studying the problem and think it’s probably because so many people are gardening. Millions more than just last year. And lots of those people bought tomato plants at stores like Home Depot, Kmart, Lowe’s and Wal-Mart.

“Infected plants were sold throughout the northeast in the box stores. They were transplanted to home gardens and from there the pathogen disbursed to other home gardens, to conventional and organic farms.”

Fry says you might not even notice at the supermarket. Commercial tomato growers spray lots of fungicide to keep away the blight. But organic tomatoes are getting harder to find.

But chefs and tomato lovers who’ve waited all season for those locally-grown heirloom – and especially organic – tomatoes aren’t finding what they want in markets in the northeast.

Back at the Cleveland market, chef and restaurant owner Karen Small has been waiting for tomato season – and it finally hit. She depends on this market for her produce and stops at just about every stand.

But as Small hears farmer after farmer describe what they think is late blight – she’s worried about the weeks to come.

“We’re accustomed to having tomatoes well into September, and maybe that’s not going to happen this year.”

Small plans to go home and rip out the tomato plants in her home garden – after hearing late blight described so many times, she’s pretty sure her tomatoes are infected.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

Related Links

Gardens Going Mobile

  • Wilson City Farm is part of Chicago's Resource Center, and Tim Wilson is the garden manager. The 1.25 acre plot produces eighty varieties of eleven crops. (Photo by Shawn Allee)

Urban farming is supposed to be a solution to getting fresh, locally-produced food to city folk.
The movement’s taking off because a lot of cities have empty, vacant lots to plant on, but there’s a problem: city governments or developers won’t let growers stay on those lots forever.
Shawn Allee met one urban farmer who’s not worried about losing the farm:

Transcript

Urban farming is supposed to be a solution to getting fresh, locally-produced food to city folk.
The movement’s taking off because a lot of cities have empty, vacant lots to plant on, but there’s a problem: city governments or developers won’t let growers stay on those lots forever.
Shawn Allee met one urban farmer who’s not worried about losing the farm:

Ken Dunn’s City Farm looks less like a traditional farm than a construction site.

There’s fence around an acre or so of soil. There are two small sheds.
And there’s a greenhouse – but it’s not glass or anything – its plastic strung over a bunch of metal tubes.

These are available commercially for about 1,500 dollars and will last for many years. This is the third year this one’s been up.

Dunn makes no apology for the make-shift feel.

“This is a mobile farmstead. Our fence that surrounds this property has been in three locations in the past twenty years as have the tool shed, and office trailer. So, everything here can be picked up and moved within a week or, if necessary, within a couple days.”

In fact, Dunn’s planning on it. He’s on land owned by the City of Chicago, and he has to move next year.

“Our deal with them is that we are occupying it until they sell the property. I think it will be having luxury condominiums. I think they have a price tag of 6 million dollars on this acre. As tax payers we have to take the six million.”

But Dunn’s not worried – he’s lined up another lot to plant on.
Dunn thinks more urban farmers should be just as mobile as he is by keeping their equipment light and scouting for the next available growing space.

Here’s his argument: City governments or developers might let you squat on vacant land for a while, but you can’t count on them selling it to you at an affordable price – or just giving it you.

Seems reasonable enough, but I thought I’d ask urban farming groups how they take this mobile farm idea.

“In my opinion, it should be permanent.”

This is Erika Allen.
She heads the Chicago branch of a group called Growing Power.

“It shouldn’t be something that you have access to some land for a few years and then have to move. In my mind, that’s not agriculture.”

Allen says across the country, urban farms have provided fresh food and even jobs.

She says mobile farming kind of let’s city governments off easy; if urban farms are so useful, cities should help them own farmland.

“I think once we were able to prove you can grow food in the city and it can be productive and beautiful, then it’s an issue of policy. What’s the priority? Why aren’t we relegating some of this space just for urban agriculture?”

Ken Dunn says he’s heard this criticism before. He calls his mobile farming approach a little more realistic.

Dunn says rural farmers can’t grow everything they want, however they want; they have to adjust to the landscape, soil conditions, and weather.

He says he’s just adjusting to an urban reality: real-estate markets value commercial and residential property more than farmland.

“We have to operate this sustainably. That is, working within the forces that are operating instead of hoping to always get 15 years in some hidden corner or somewhere and it might turn into less because someone comes in overnight and bulldozes your project. So, sustainability means keeping operative from year to year with no setbacks. A planned move is no set-back at all.”

With that, Dunn has to leave.
It’s planting season and he and his staff have a lot of work. They want this crop to be special, since it could be their last growing season on this vacant lot.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

Related Links

Experimenting With a Global Warming Garden

  • Todd Forrest at the New York Botanical Garden's Ladies Border Garden. (Photo by Brad Linder)

When you think about global warming, you probably think about polar ice caps
melting and rising sea levels. But climate change is also having a more immediate
effect — on gardeners. As average temperatures rise, many gardeners are finding
they can grow non-native plants in their back yards. Brad Linder visited one public
garden that’s been nicknamed “the global warming garden”:

Transcript

When you think about global warming, you probably think about polar ice caps
melting and rising sea levels. But climate change is also having a more immediate
effect — on gardeners. As average temperatures rise, many gardeners are finding
they can grow non-native plants in their back yards. Brad Linder visited one public
garden that’s been nicknamed “the global warming garden”:


Most gardeners know there are some plants they’ll never be able to grow, because
of the climate where they live. But the Earth’s climate is changing, and that means
plants that normally grow in the southern United States are thriving as far north as
New York City:


“This Japanese Flowering Apricot, prunus mume. This is a plant that’s widely
grown further south. It’s actually native originally to China, but it’s beloved in Japan.”



Todd Forrest is vice president for horticulture at the New York Botanical Garden:


“And so what we’ve found with climate change is that this plant survives, because
the winter temperatures are on average warmer. But because there’s variability in
our local climate, it will often have its flowers burned by frost.”



Forrest is walking through the Ladies Border Garden, an experimental section of the
Botanical Garden designed to demonstrate the impact of climate change on plants.
Forrest sometimes calls the Ladies Border “the global warming garden,” because
most of the plants are species that couldn’t have grown in this area a few decades
ago.


Climate change probably has been affecting plants and gardeners for years. But
Forrest says it’s only recently that people have put two and two together and realized
that unpredictable weather patterns are affecting their herb gardens:


“Gardeners at times suffer the sort of head in the sand syndrome. They’re so
obsessed with and attuned to their individual garden and climate. And we’re all used
to being frustrated by the weather. I think for a long time we all just sort of ascribed
whatever change there was or variability to that darn weather again. Acting up.
Raining when it should be dry. Dry when it should be raining. Cold when it should be
warm.”


In some ways, the Ladies Border Garden shows how exciting global warming can
be for gardeners. You can grow all sorts of exotic plants in your backyard if you don’t
have to deal with the long cold winters you’re used to.


Forrest has been able to get dozens of unusual plants to grow in New York, including
Choysia and even a Himalayan Fan Palm. That’s right, a palm tree growing in New
York City.


But just because you can grow non-native plants doesn’t mean you should. Because
foreign plants can easily become invasive species, killing off local plants.
Marielle Anzelone is a botanist and garden designer. Her specialty is working with
local plants. Today she’s planting a native-species garden in a public park:



“All the plants are going to have little signs in front of them that say what they are,
because it’s meant to be educational. People should see a plant, say oh, it’s
gorgeous. Want it. Oh, it’s vibernum nutem. And then run out to their nursery
and get it.”


Anzelone says many people don’t realize how beautiful local plants are. For
example, she says people often buy wreaths made of Asiatic Bittersweet vines —
even though it’s an invasive species that’s been killing off American Bittersweet:


“And people maybe then who hang the wreath outside on their door. A bird comes
and eats the berries and poops it out in Prospect Park or Central Park. I mean, that
is how these things get around. So it’s not just your world in a vacuum and nothing
comes to your garden. I mean, birds travel, insects travel.”


That’s why, under normal circumstances, gardeners have to be careful what they
plant in their backyards. Because non-native plants have a way of spreading and
competing with local plants, and climate change complicates things by making it
easier for invasive species to spread:


“The thing that keeps me up at night is not global warming. It’s extinction crisis. And I
think people think a lot about extinction as being this big dramatic thing. It’s a fire, it’s
an oil spill. But actually it doesn’t work that way. Extinction happens on a small scale
all the time.”



As the climate changes, Anzelone says she understands that gardeners will want to
try new things. But she says they shouldn’t forget about native plants, which feed
native insects and animals.


The New York Botanical Garden’s Todd Forrest admits that the Ladies Border
Garden is both exciting and disturbing. While he can demonstrate that new plants
will grow in New York, he knows that global warming is also killing off plants that
have lived here for thousands of years.


For the Environment Report, I’m Brad Linder.

Related Links

Growing Zones Warm Up

  • The National Arbor Day Foundation's revised hardiness zone map. (Photo courtesy of the National Arbor Day Foundation)

If you’ve been thinking about landscaping your yard, you should know things have
changed. The climate is warming so quickly that one organization has changed the
plant hardiness zone map. That’s the little map you sometimes see on the back of
seed packets. Lester Graham reports… you might want to check out the new map
before you spend hundreds of dollars on a tree that might not live long in your
warmer zone:

Transcript

If you’ve been thinking about landscaping your yard, you should know things have
changed. The climate is warming so quickly that one organization has changed the
plant hardiness zone map. That’s the little map you sometimes see on the back of
seed packets. Lester Graham reports… you might want to check out the new map
before you spend hundreds of dollars on a tree that might not live long in your
warmer zone:


You know, I’ve talked to a lot of gardeners and homeowners who do their own
landscaping about this plant hardiness zone map change, and at first they’re
kind of astounded. The growing zones are changing? Because it’s getting warmer?


But then, they sort of pause and think for a moment… and usually say something like,
“That makes sense.”


The United States Department of Agriculture issues the plant hardiness zone map.
It’s basically a map of the annual average low temperatures that helps folks figure
out what they can plant and expect to survive. But the USDA hasn’t updated its map
since 1990.


The spokesman at the National Arbor Day Foundation, Woody Nelson – I kid you not,
the Arbor Day guy’s name is Woody – Woody says his organization issued a new
map because it really needed to be updated:


“You know, people were asking us to help out, you know, ‘This old USDA map just doesn’t
seem to work for us anymore. I don’t think it’s accurate. What can you do to help?’
So we took it upon ourselves to give tree-planters the most up-to-date information
that we could.”


So the National Arbor Day Foundation looked at the low temperature data gathered
by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration since 1990, and the people
were right: things are warming up:


“And over that 15-year span that we used, much of the country had warmed a full
hardiness zone.”


And there’s a ten degree difference from one zone to the next. It shows a real on-
the-ground trend.


Richard Andres is with Tantre Farm. They grow organic produce for farmers’
markets like this one in Michigan. Andres didn’t know about the new Arbor Day
Hardiness Zone map, but it makes sense to him. He says he’s seeing more
extremes:


“You know, last winter was unusually warm. The winter before, unusually warm.
So, we really didn’t even get a decent freeze. We had a huge amount of bugs the
following spring. So we are noticing more extremes.”


But a farmer or gardener can adjust things for annual plants. Long term, you’re
probably wondering whether you can now plant that dogwood or whether you
should plant that spruce from up north.


(Sound of sprinkler)


Phil Walsh sells a lot of trees at Lodi Farms nursery. He knew about the new Arbor
Day Hardiness Zone map. But, he says there’s a lot more to think about than just
the annual average low temperature when you’re thinking about planting:


“Cold is not the only, or really the most, important factor when determining plant
hardiness. Questions like soil: is it well-drained; is it not; is it wet; is it dry; is it acid
or is it alkaline; do you have wind; do you have shade? Questions like this: is it high
in organic material or low in organic material? These tend to have more impact on
whether or not plants survive than strictly the zone rating.”


Walsh says the trees are pretty tough, and most of them can adapt:


“Yes, things have warmed up over the last 15 years and they may well continue or it may change and it may go down. Pick a good, hardy plant that’s well-suited for your soil
and typically one that’s native here, that’s gone through these temperature changes
in the past and I don’t expect anybody’s going to have any problems with them.”


That’s not to say that every kind of tree is taking this in stride. For example, black
spruce trees adapted to Canadian and upper New England cold might not be such a
good choice as far south as it’s been grown in the past.


Woody Nelson at the National Arbor Day Foundation says trees native to the North
are starting to be affected by the warming climate:


“There’s a whole lot of white pines that have been planted in Georgia, in the South
as a nice landscape tree over the years. And now those white pines are coming
under a little bit of stress. The native lodge pole pines, the native loblolly pines in the
deep South, again native species are something that we want to promote and stick
with.”


So, the basic rule is: if the plant hardiness zone map has shifted one growing zone
warmer in just 15 years, you’ll probably want to stick to trees native to your area, or
from just a little south of you just in case this warming trend sticks around for a while.


For the Environment Report, this is Lester Graham.

Related Links

Gardeners Bats for Guano

A dealer in plant fertilizers is getting top dollar for product that he gathers close to home. Fred Kight reports some gardeners are just bats for the nutrient:

Transcript

A dealer in plant fertilizers is getting top dollar for product that he gathers close to home. Fred
Kight reports some gardeners are just bats for the nutrient:


What sells for 14 dollars a pound, comes from church steeples and is a fantastic plant fertilizer?
It’s bat poop. Or, more properly, bat guano.


Matt Peters says he already was selling worm dung as a plant food.


When nearby church leaders called him about their bat dropping problems, he added the guano to
the fertilizer inventory of his Ohio business. Peters says some customers are attracted by the
novelty… while others just want healthy plants:


“Definitely in my own personal trials I’ve been amazed at the power of bat guano. I never knew
green could be so green.”


Peters says the original manufacturers, so to speak, of his guano eat mosquitoes.


Since mosquitoes are nitrogen-rich, so is the bat guano… and plants love nitrogen.


For the Environment Report, I’m Fred Kight.

Related Links

Study Reinforces Pesticide-Parkinson’s Link

People who are often exposed to high levels of pesticides
could be at a higher risk of developing Parkinson’s Disease. The
GLRC’s Chris Lehman reports on the findings of a new study:

Transcript

People who are often exposed to high levels of pesticides could be at a higher risk of
developing Parkinson’s Disease. The GLRC’s Chris Lehman reports on the findings of a
new study:


Researchers say people who are routinely around pesticides are 70 percent more likely to
develop Parkinson’s Disease. Alberto Aschiero was the lead researcher. He says the
pattern seems to be true for both farmers and backyard gardeners. He says even though
the findings are not conclusive, they confirm the results of earlier studies:


“I think this is enough to recommend to people to be very conservative in using
pesticides, especially when one is not essential, like in some home and garden
applications.”


Aschiero says he’s not advocating a warning label be placed on pesticide products yet.
He says that would be more appropriate if researchers can pinpoint specific pesticides
that are linked to Parkinson’s disease.


For the GLRC, I’m Chris Lehman.

Related Links

Building an Ark for the World’s Plants

  • Prairie plants are being lost to development.(Courtesy of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory)

You’ve heard about the ark Noah built to save the world’s animals. Now comes news of another kind of ark – one designed to help save the world’s plants. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Sandy Hausman has that story:

Transcript

You’ve heard about the ark Noah built to save the world’s animals. Now
comes news of another kind of ark – one designed to help save the
world’s plants. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Sandy Hausman
has that story:


(Sound of walking through the prairie up then under)


You might say Pati Vitt is looking for the right stock to fill the ark.
She’s dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, her long brown hair in braids, a field
notebook in hand, and a pencil tied to her pants. For nine months of each
year, she wanders along railroad tracks, through old cemeteries and
nature preserves, filling shopping bags with the seeds of prairie plants.


Vitt is a conservation scientist with the Chicago Botanic Garden. She has
studied these plants since she was a child. She knows their Latin names.
She dreams about them at night. She even knows the intimate details of
their reproductive lives:


“One does it having teeny little flowers and taking small little bees, and
another one does it by having huge flowers and lots of nectar and they
have really big bees or maybe a moth that pollinates them.”


And, she says, prairie plants are hearty. Native to the Upper Midwest,
they can handle icy winters and long, hot droughts, but they can’t fight
plows or bulldozers. Farmers and developers have destroyed almost all
the land where prairie plants once grew. Today, one-tenth of one percent
of the original prairie remains.


“That means that what we’re looking at right here is one-tenth of one
percent of the population that this plant once enjoyed. I’m sorry. Even
though there’s a lot in this prairie, this plant should be endangered,
because there are so few acres of its habitat left and everyday we’re
coming and we’re taking more and more of it. The prairie habitat is more
endangered than tropical rainforest.”


That worries Vitt, not only because she thinks the prairie plants are
beautiful, but because they may have value to people. For example, she
says about half of our modern medicines came – originally – from plants
or the fungus found in the soil beneath them.

“If you think about penicillin… penicillin came from mold. We might be
standing on a treasure trove of antibiotics, which we need, but if we let
the plants go, we let the soil fungi go, we let the potential antibiotics go.”


(Sound of seeds dropping into a jar)


So Vitt is collecting prairie seeds from about 1,500 plants and shipping
them to the English countryside.


(Sound of birds)


Just south of London, the British government has built what it hopes will
be the largest seed bank in the world devoted to wild plants. The
building looks like a series of greenhouses made from concrete, stone,
glass and steel. In the basement, fire and bombproof vaults hold billions of
seeds from 24,000 species:


“That’s the exciting bit. We thought big.”


Michael Way is a scientist at the Millennium Seed Bank. He says it’s
needed now because a lot of wild plants are in danger of
disappearing because of global warming and the pace of human
development. Way believes a third of the world’s plant species could be
gone by 2050.


“You hope that the worst is not going to happen. Of course, from time to
time the worst does happen. If a plant population is destroyed, if a
decision is taken to build houses or factories or roads on a particular area
which was home to some quite special plants, seed banking is one tool
you can use to protect that genetic diversity that might be unique to that
site.”


Each day, seeds arrive from Africa, Australia, Europe, the Middle East
and the Americas. They sit in colorful plastic crates — waiting to be
cleaned, dried and frozen. Way says these seeds could survive for a
century or more.


“Seeds are tough – small but tough, and the whole point of seeds is to be
dormant and allow themselves to be transported around, so unless we do
something really stupid, they will remain viable.”


Back in the U.S., Pati Vitt says seed banks like the one near London
could mean the survival of humanity, since people can’t live without
plants.


“I think fundamentally we all understand that we are a part of nature, but
in our daily lives we get so cut off from it that we forget.”


She sees the Earth as a garden, and she wants people to act like
gardeners. Setting up seed banks is an important first step.


“We will have the tools that we need to bring things back if necessary.”


For the GLRC, I’m Sandy Hausman.

Related Links

The Foibles of Suburban Lawn Care

  • Although a well-manicured lawn offers certain benefits... not everyone thinks it's worth the effort. (Photo by Ed Herrmann)

One of the great rituals in suburban America is mowing the lawn. A manicured lawn seems to say that the house is well cared for, that it belongs to the neighborhood. Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Ed Herrmann wonders whether this obsession for the perfect lawn is worth the effort:

Transcript

One of the great rituals in suburban America is mowing the lawn. A
manicured lawn seems to say that the house is well cared for, that it belongs
to the neighborhood. Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Ed
Herrmann wonders whether this obsession with the perfect lawn is worth the
effort:


(sound of evening insects)


It’s a late summer evening and at last I can go outside and enjoy the
sounds of the neighborhood. There’s a little breeze, the air is cooler. The
chorus of insects is soothing, gentle but insistent, an ancient throbbing
resonance. Much better than during the day…


(roar of lawn machines)


Summer days in the suburbs are the time of assault, when people attack their
lawns with powerful weapons from the chemical and manufacturing
industries. Anyone who uses the words “quiet” and “suburbs” in the same
sentence has never been to a suburb, at least not in summer.


It takes a lot of noise to maintain a lawn. Besides the mower, you’ve got edgers, trimmers,
leaf blowers, weed whackers, core aerators, little tractors, big tractors, slitting
machines. I don’t know whatever happened to rakes and hand clippers. One
thing’s for sure. This quest for lawn perfection wouldn’t be possible without
the industrial revolution.


(machines stop)


So where did we get the idea that a house should be surrounded by a field of
uniform grass kept at the same height?


Well, with apologies to the Queen, I’m afraid we must blame the British. It
seems that, along with our language, our imperial ambitions and our
ambivalent morals, America also gets its notion of what a lawn should look
like from the English. Of course, the estates of the English aristocracy were
tended by a staff of gardeners. England also has a milder climate, and the
grass that looks so nice there doesn’t do as well in North America. In the
1930’s the USDA came up with a blend of imported grasses that would
tolerate our climate. Since these grasses are not native, they need help, and
that calls for fertilizers, pesticides and lots of extra water. Since normal
people can’t afford gardeners who trim by hand, that means lawn machines.
American industry to the rescue.


(mower starts up, fades under next sentence)


A quick Google tells me that today we have 40 million lawn mowers in use.
Each emits 11 times the pollution of a new car, and lawn mowers contribute
five percent of the nation’s air pollution. Plus more than 70 million pounds of
pesticides are used each year and over half of our residential water is used
for landscaping. Don’t you love those automatic sprinklers that come on in the
rain? Add to that all the time that people spend mowing and edging. Of
course the two billion dollar lawn care industry is thrilled about all this
enthusiasm, but I gotta ask, “Is it worth it?”


Call me old fashioned, but I actually prefer the looks of a meadow with mixed
wildflowers and grasses to the lawn that looks like a pool table. My own lawn
is somewhere between. It’s mowed, but it’s what you might call multicultural.


There are at least five different kinds of grass with different colors and
thicknesses, plus clover, dandelions, mushrooms, a few pinecones, and a
rabbit hole or two. There’s also some kind of nasty weed with thorns, but even
that has nice purple flowers if it gets big enough.


Clover, by the way, used to be added to grass seed because it adds nitrogen to
the soil. Now we just buy a bag of nitrogen fertilizer, so who needs clover?
And what’s wrong with
dandelions? You can eat them, some people even make wine out of them,
they have happy yellow flowers; yet to most people they indicate your yard is
out of control. So I’m down on my hands and knees pulling dandelions. I’m
not sure why, but I hope it keeps the neighbors happy.


One thing I won’t give in to, though, is the chemical spraying trucks, painted
green of course, that roll through the neighborhood.


I can only hold my breath. (sound of trucks and mowers) Try not to listen. And
wait for the evening. (evening insects)


(air conditioner starts up)


Although, with all these air conditioners, even the night’s not too quiet.


But that’s another story.


Host tag: “Ed Herrmann is an outdoor enthusiast living in the
suburbs of Detroit.”

Related Links

Earthworms Alter Forest Ecology

Most of us think of earthworms as beneficial creatures. Gardeners are always happy to spot a worm in the flowerbed because they add fertilizer to the soil. Many anglers say they’re the best thing for catching fish. But scientists are beginning to learn worms aren’t so friendly to Great Lakes forests. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Stephanie Hemphill reports:

Transcript

Most of us think of earthworms as beneficial creatures. Gardeners are always happy to spot a
worm in the flowerbed because they add fertilizer to the soil. And many anglers say they’re the
best thing for catching fish. But scientists are beginning to learn worms aren’t so friendly to
Great Lakes forests. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Stephanie Hemphill reports.


(fade up Girl Scouts)


This Girl Scout troop is learning about worms. Judy Gibbs is a naturalist at the Hartley Nature
Center in Duluth. She shows the girls how to coax worms out of the soil. They pour water laced
with powdered mustard into the worms’ burrows.


It irritates the worms and they come squiggling up by the hundreds.


“Pour it in. Wait a minute. Here it comes. It doesn’t like the mustard and it comes right up.
Look at this one (laughter). oh, there’s another one. Look at it go!” (shrieks)


On their walk through the woods, the girls look for dead leaves. There aren’t many. Judy Gibbs
explains why.


“Here’s a leaf stem that’s being pulled into this hole. Who’s doing this? Ants! No. Worms.
There’s big night crawlers. You know what a night crawler is? They grow straight down into the
ground, and they come up at night and pull leaves down into their burrows. And they eat the leaf
right off. That’s why we’re not finding any leaves.”


Worms eating leaves might seem natural, but it turns out these worms aren’t native to these
woods. The last glacier buried most of what is now the Great Lakes region. When it melted,
plants and animals returned to create a community of maples, pines, songbirds, and tender plants
growing on the forest floor, like trillium…but not earthworms.


Cindy Hale is a biologist who studies the native wildflowers that grow in northern hardwood
forests. She loves the spring bloomers that take root in the spongy layer of decaying leaves on
the forest floor. Trillium, bloodroot, solomon’s seal.


Hale says many of these plants are disappearing.


“Sites that forty years ago were carpets of trillium have been slowly over the last two decades
declining to almost nothing, and people were scratching their heads, trying to figure out just
what’s going on.”


Earthworm populations are thickest close to cities. But Hale says people bring worms with them
when they come to the woods.


At first, settlers carried them in, along with the animals and plants they brought from Europe or
the east coast. These days, worms are spread by people who drive in the woods – loggers, ATV
riders…


“But in particular, fishing bait is a huge way that worms get moved around in our region.
Because there’s so many lakes and so much fishing.”


Hale and her colleagues set up test plots along an advancing line of worms in the Chippewa
National Forest in central Minnesota. The worms crawl about three yards further into the forest
each year. Hale is studying how the soil and the plants have changed as the worms advance.


Worms eat the decaying leaves on the forest floor. They mix that organic matter into the mineral
soil beneath it. And in time, they can use up all the organic matter and leave only mineral soil
behind.


That means the plants that have evolved to take root in the leaves on top of the soil have lost their
home.


Hale says these changes could affect every plant and animal that lives in the woods. She says,
for instance, even birds have declined by nearly 50% in the last fourteen years.


“Because ovenbirds nest in that forest floor, so if you lose the forest floor, then you may well
affect ground-nesting birds such as that. So when you start thinking about it, the potential
ramifications across the ecosystem get really wild.”


Hale says one of the big challenges in studying this problem is that there’s been very little basic
research – like how many worms are there are and where.


To gather more information and to get more people involved, Hale created a web-based learning
program. She’s asking teachers from around the country to have their classes do worm counts
and other research. Hale plans to add their data to the web page.


In Minnesota, the Department of Natural Resources is working with interest groups to try to slow
the spread of worms. Next year’s fishing regulations will include instructions not to dump your
worms at the end of a day of fishing.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Stephanie Hemphill in Duluth.

Hunt for Slug-Eating Nematodes

A $5,000 reward is being offered to anyone who finds a tiny, parasitic worm in the U.S. that kills leaf-eating slugs. The gray garden slug is notorious for destroying crops and ornamental plants in the Midwest. Researchers at Ohio State University have been looking for the worm that eats the slugs. So far, they’ve examined thousands of slugs sent to them in the mail … but they haven’t been able to find the worm. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Natalie Walston reports:

Transcript

A five thousand dollar reward is being offered to anyone who finds a tiny, parasitic worm in the United States that kills leaf-eating slugs. The gray garden slug is notorious for destroying crops and ornamental plants in the Midwest. Researchers at Ohio State University have been looking for the worm that eats the slugs. So far, they’ve examined thousands of slugs sent to them in the mail, but they haven’t been able to find the worm. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Natalie Walston reports.


(Natural sound of guinea hens)


The Kingwood Center in Mansfield, Ohio is made up of 50 acres of well-tended English gardens. Paved trails lead through rows of perennials and peonies, around fountains and a duck pond. Hundreds of hostas grow beneath shade trees, but the plants leaves have holes chewed through them. John Makely is Kingwood’s head gardener. He says the conventional methods to kill the slugs eating his hostas are out of the question here.


“The problem that we have here with slug bait is that we do have birds roaming around, peacocks and guinea hens that roam around freely. They sort of grouse, browse I should say, the grounds and we would be afraid that they would pick up some of those pellets and poison them.”


Slug bait consists of a poison that can harm more than its intended target. But right now, it’s the only commercial method available to control slugs. So, now there’s a big push by large, commercial nurseries to find a chemical-free way to kill the gray garden slugs that eat ornamental plants. Ohio State University researcher, Pavinder Grewal says there’s a major economic reason to find a good control method.


“Last year we had a lot of rain here when the corn was emerging. And there have been several fields in Ohio that were totally wiped out by the slugs. Basically zero corn production in some fields.”


Grewal has found a natural slug killer. It’s a tiny parasitic worm, known as a nematode. It is native to England and parts of several countries in South America. Farmers and gardeners in those countries buy them in bulk in powder form and sprinkle the worms on their fields. Scientists think the worm will work in this country as well. But if the worm is imported, it must first undergo years of testing to make sure it will not harm native plants and animals.


“We don’t see any problem because some of the tests that we have performed with the nematode…we find it to be pretty safe to non-target organisms. And, we find that this nematode does not infect all slugs.”


To prove this to the federal government could be difficult. Grewal is looking for the worm, in the United States he took out an ad in various publications. He studies more than twenty thousand slugs, but has yet to find the worm he’s looking for. Now he’s sending people off to remote areas of the country to find it. He hopes to be successful because it could take years of testing before the worms can be brought into this country. For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Natalie Walston.